Smaller Government?

The Tea Party Express rolled into Denver yesterday. I saw on the news the signs they bounced in their hands in a didactic gesture of insistence. “Small government” was one of the more prominent ones they shook with anger and self righteousness.
And then reality began to confront their plea in my memory bank. I began to think about the last time I stood in line for any length of time. No, it wasn’t to get tickets to the opera or the symphony or even a play at the Space Theatre. It was at the Post Office. I had gone there to retrieve my mail after being out of town for a few weeks. There was one person working behind the counter, there were two people in front of me, and there was a line forming and lengthening behind me as we waited for the woman who was insuring a package, buying stamps, and generally accomplishing all of her little missions that had brought her to the Post Office that morning.
I can remember a time when no matter how long the line was, I could get in and out of the Post Office in a few minutes because there were three people working the counter. Not today. Today, thanks to smaller government, I have to wait about a half hour to forty-five minutes to get my mail early in the morning on a Monday or Tuesday.
Then I began recalling the last time I had to go to the DMV for a car registration or a driver’s license renewal. I remember spending hours trying t get what I needed and lost almost a full day of work in the process. It seems the volume of business at the DMV is far greater than its capacity to handle it, so small government in this instance appeared to be costing productivity in the workplace a great deal.
When I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago, I noticed that road crews were everywhere patching and sealing the already magnificent roads and in the process completely eliminating any road hazards due to potholes or cracks. At this time of year in Denver, unless you have a large SUV with oversized tires, you are apt to put your front end out of alignment by dropping into some significant potholes everywhere around town. Of course, New Zealand has a more socialist government than we do, so they put social services such as national health care and road repair ahead of any shorter-sighted call for lower taxes and smaller government.
I don’t know about you, but I remember what happened when we relaxed some rules governing Wall Street during the last thirty years of the 20th Century after we seemed to forget what brought them into existence to begin with, thinking that a freer Wall Street and less government interference would be a good thing for everybody. And so we bought into trickle-down or supply-side thinking for a few decades. It turned out the government had to act about as big as you can get in the end in order to salvage the world economy from complete collapse. Had it stayed a bit bigger and more powerful to begin with, the collapse would have been prevented.
Today we have these multinational corporations that have budgets larger than most countries out there doing business in their own interest, as they are designed to do. Without big or powerful government, who is going to ensure that these corporations contribute to the greater good at the same time they make a profit for their stockholders, who tend to be rather insistent that their investments yield short term returns on a regular basis. Who is going to help guide these huge corporations on a long term course that raises the world’s quality of life as well as the already high standard of living enjoyed by investors even higher? Would you suggest The United Nations? I think not. The only government capable of doing that is the U.S. government, unless we shrink it and let the Chinese and its directed economy bury us. And unless it remains large and powerful, it will be run over by all sorts of powerful entities with a lot more resources than the Tea Party crowd.
You want “smaller government”? Corporations, China, India, even the European Union are licking their collective chops! What are you thinking, Tea Partiers! If you want to protest something, protest against fast food and industrialized agriculture, not big government. The former will shorten your lives; taxes never have. And drink some green tea instead of throwing it in the sea of your misdirected discontent.